eWeek: IBM Servers to Pair Linux, New PowerPC Chips

“In a quest for a bigger piece of the entry-level server market,
IBM Corp. has drawn up a three-year plan for producing and
marketing systems that pair Linux and IBM’s own 64-bit PowerPC
family of processors, sources report.

“According to sources, the Armonk, N.Y., company plans to take
on Sun Microsystems Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. with Linux servers
priced at the ‘enterprise entry level,’ which IBM defines as less
than $25,000. Although the current share of Linux servers running
on Power processors is marginal, IBM reportedly projects nearly a
20-fold increase—to almost half-a-million units—by
2006.

“In pursuit of this goal, IBM is poised to introduce two tiers
of products: a low-end blade server and an ‘ultra -low-end’ (ULE)
rack/deskside model. The initial blade server will be based on the
Power PC 970 processor (known internally as the GPUL), which made
its debut this month in Apple Computer Inc.’s Power Mac G5 line. A
mid-2004 replacement for the blade as well as the ULE products will
run on an updated version of that chip, known as the GPUL2…”

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